Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000

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One
Saturday in April of 1855, a large group of German immigrants assembled around
the courthouse in downtown Chicago, hoping to attend a hearing at which nineteen
saloonkeepers would stand before a judge for violating one of two new laws
enacted by the new nativist mayor, Levi Boone, who had promised during his
campaign to curb liquor consumption. One banned the sale of alcohol on Sunday,
while the other mandated a three-hundred-dollar fee for a liquor license (up
from fifty dollars in previous years). As constables tried to move the crowd
out of the street, a tussle broke out. The Chicago Tribune fashioned the crowd
as monsters. The street, it claimed, was “crowded with a multitude of the most
desperate and savage characters in the city, ready for any blood, rapine or
murder.” It’s true that the crowd was angry and agitated, but it was the show
of force by a constable that turned the assembly into a melee, a mob against
the police.

Working-class
taverns were often the center of immigrant community life, especially on
Sundays, the one day most workers had off, and the liquor license fees
threatened to make the cost of running one too high. What the Chicago Tribune later
framed as an “ordinance requiring them to close their Lager Beer Halls on the
Sabbath, and restrain their Bacchanalian revels for one day,” was in practice a
great challenge to leisure and to community. German and Irish immigrants
quickly found their own taverns and Bierstuben raided on Sundays, and owners of
establishments in immigrant neighborhoods faced arrest for not paying the
higher fees. (Drinking establishments frequented by the elite, many just blocks
from the city hall and courthouse, quietly broke the law without interruption.)
The Germans who assembled that Saturday feared the loss of their neighborhood
life—in fact, many worried that German-style lagers, brewed mostly in Wisconsin
would cease be exported to Chicago entirely without a healthy collection of
Bierstuben.

When
the fighting broke out, as more patrolmen showed up, the crowd began retreating
north, back up the street and across the Chicago river. Eight men were arrested
and placed in the jail beneath the courthouse. A mob formed on the north side
of the river, determined to free the eight. The mayor had the newly constructed
pivot bridge of Clark street swing open, cutting off the mob on the other side
of the river from the courthouse. He handed out stars to a force of temporary
patrolmen. But with the police still greatly outnumbered, he called in three
independent militia as well. After a few hours, and with the assembled men on
either side having not dispersed, officials decided they had to briefly swing
the bridge back around to relieve backed up traffic. The moment the bridge
connected both sides, the mob in the north rushed over it. In the
confrontation, shots rang out, shattering a window, but in the end only two
deaths were recorded: one cop and the man who shot him. The militia arrived
shortly after to fully clear away bystanders. Boone declared martial law, and
militia patrolled the streets that night. Two cannons sat at the ready, aimed
at the scene where the mob and patrols had met.

In
the week that followed, some of Chicago’s most prominent figures advertised a
“Law and Order” meeting to discuss ways to “preserve the public peace.” J.
Young Scammon, owner of the Marine Bank and one of the financiers of Chicago’s
first railroad, was elected president of the meeting. Those present advocated
for the formation of a unified police force. At the time, Chicago had two sets
of police. Daytime constables and night watchmen both worked part time, with
roughly the same responsibilities. They were not professional defenders of the
peace; they were by and large elected directly by city residents. In fact, they
didn’t even have uniforms—only small star-shaped badges.

There
are two origin stories for police departments in the United States. As
historian Sam Mitrani notes in his book on the origins of Chicago’s police
department, the earliest departments were Southern ones, organized like
militaries. They came into being to control large populations of slaves. The
archetype of these was in New Orleans, a uniformed and armed force called the “Gendarmerie”
that briefly patrolled between 1805 and 1806. Then there were the industrial
cities’ police departments, like New York City’s and London’s, which arose out
of the need to control dense populations of workers in newly crowded
neighborhoods. The impetus to found London’s department—the first municipal
force to have men assigned to patrol neighborhoods at all times—came out of
riots surrounding the return of Queen Caroline to England in 1820. Sir Robert
Peel, the department’s architect and strongest advocate, modeled it almost
entirely on the department he led in Dublin—one run as an explicit arm of
English power over Ireland. In New York, a series of riots in 1834 and looting
after the great fire of 1835 provided the spark of encouragement to professionalize
and militarize a set of constables that had originally been established in
1741, after a failed slave revolt. In both the South and North, the object was
at its core the same—to try and diminish the power that comes from a lot of
otherwise powerless people gathering together in a space; riots and revolts,
not theft and murder, were what police departments were first made to combat.

A
week after the meeting, Chicago’s city council passed sweeping police reforms:
night watchmen and day patrolmen would regularly trade shifts, wear uniforms,
and take orders from a superintendent of police. It followed the New York City
model, with armed officers organized like a military force, designed in large
part to keep the urban poor from demonstrating.

In
1856, immigrant communities rallied together behind the Democratic candidate,
named Thomas Dyer, defeating Boone’s effort for re-election. The Republican
Chicago Tribune declared that Dyer would likely preside over “such a police as
the mob which rallied in our streets after the battle would elect. What
vindicators of law and order they will be let their shouts, blasphemies and
orgies on the day of the ‘big drunk’ bear witness.”

That
phrase, “law and order,” which seems to gesture toward all of the ideals of urban
civilization, of a clean and polite city filled with obedient citizens, had
circulated in discourse about urban unrest since the turn of the nineteenth
century, but with the emergence of professional police forces, its cultural
meaning became solidified. Since then, the phrase has remained the essential
rhetorical shorthand of police advocates—it had a particularly potent moment
during the Republican electoral successes in the nineteen sixties—helping sell
ideas about strengthening drug laws, restoring state death penalties, building
prisons, and more heavily arming officers. From their beginnings all the way to
today’s black sites and armored vehicles, police forces have been haunted by a
military spirit. Armed forces and law enforcement are two guns of different
gauge, forged by the same maker.

“It
Was a Riot” is an occasional series about riots in American history.

Colosimo primarily dealt in prostitution,
extortion, narcotics, gambling and bootlegging inside the city of Chicago. Executed
by Underlings

Johnny Torrio

1920-1924.

Torrio expanded the mobs interest outside
Chicago to the surrounding suburbs. Deposed by Underlings. Died of natural
causes.

Al Capone

1925-1932.

Capone kept the status qua given to him
and did little to expand the mobs holdings or interest in other areas, although
he did solidify the organizations stranglehold on Chicago bootlegging. Sentenced
to prison. Died of natural causes

In 1940 Johnny Wooley took
over the late Ernie Henderson's Chicken Shack at 4647 S.
Indiana, to use as Policy cash drop. Wooley was part of the Jones
Brothers policy operation

The Drexel Bank, one of
several banks used to hold the cash of Mack and George Jones policy operations.

5906
South Parkway An independent gambling book in
1940, closed by police who suspected the place was run or at least owned by
gambler Pat Manno and Golf Bag Hunt

5531
S. State Street, An independent gambling book in
1940, closed by police who suspected the place was run or at least owned by
gambler Pat Manno and Golf Bag Hunt

5929 S.
Indiana. An independent gambling book in 1940, closed by police
who suspected the place was run or at least owned by gambler Pat Manno and Golf
Bag Hunt

464 South State street was a gambling den owned and operated by Mushmouth Johnson was by far his most opulent. A multi-purpose
facility, the site also housed a popular saloon patronized by the cities elite.

Corner of 11th and State Street said
to be a “house of "assignation" owned by gambler Mushmouth Johnson

5051 South Michigan Ave., the site of the Kelly Brothers (Illy and Hoppy)
headquarters.

CHICAGO
(AP) — In the pantheon of Chicago crime fighters, nobody has the worldwide
reputation of Eliot Ness.

He's
the Prohibition agent who brought down Al Capone, the principled lawman in a
city awash in corruption, the relentless investigator portrayed by actors
Robert Stack and Kevin Costner and the legend who is said to have inspired
comic-strip detective Dick Tracy.

Nearly
six decades after his death, Ness is still so admired that Illinois' two U.S.
senators want to name a federal building after him in Washington, D.C.

But
a Chicago alderman, citing a recent Capone biography, concludes that Ness had
about as much to do with putting the gangster behind bars as Mrs. O'Leary's cow
had to do with starting the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, when the animal
supposedly knocked over a lantern. And he's trying to persuade the senators to
drop the whole idea.

"There
are literally hundreds of heroic law enforcement officials" who would be
deserving of the honor, "but Eliot Ness is simply not one of them,"
said Ed Burke, who hopes the senators will abandon the proposal much the way
the council formally cleared Mrs. O'Leary's cow in 1997 at Burke's urging.

Ness'
career has always been imbued with a mix of fact and fiction. He did go after
Capone, but his role was probably less heroic than many Americans imagine.

Ness,
Burke said, "is a Hollywood myth," and to honor him would be a
disservice to others.

There
are no signs the senators are considering backing down from a resolution to put
Ness' name on the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
headquarters.

Capone
"believed that every man had his price," Sen. Dick Durbin said
earlier this month in a statement with fellow Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk and Sen.
Sherrod Brown of Ohio. But for Ness and his law-enforcement team known as
"The Untouchables," ''no amount of money could buy their loyalty or
sway their dedication to Chicago's safety."

The
ATF declined to comment on the issue. Judging by the agency's website, where
Ness is the first entry in the "history" section, its support of Ness
remains unwavering.

"Against
all odds, he and his Untouchables broke the back of organized crime in
Chicago," reads the agency's short biography of Ness.

The
author of an upcoming Ness biography has also weighed in, saying while Ness was
not involved with the income tax case that sent Capone to prison, he was a key
figure in the broader battle against Capone in Chicago, and his contribution to
law enforcement has been misunderstood and discounted for too long.

"Ness
never claimed to have anything to do with the tax case on Capone," said
Doug Perry, the author. "The Untouchables' job was to harass Capone's
operations and squeeze his income stream, and they did that."

These
facts are undisputed: After graduating from the University of Chicago, Ness was
barely into his 20s when he took a job as a temporary Prohibition agent in
1926. He quickly climbed through the ranks until, according to the ATF website,
he put together a squad in 1930 to go after Capone's bootlegging operation. But
prosecutors chose to pursue the gangster on tax charges instead.

A
few years later, Ness' law enforcement career took him to Cincinnati and
Cleveland, where in 1933 he left his job to become, at just 33, the city's
public safety director. He was widely praised for cleaning up Cleveland
corruption.

Ness
ran unsuccessfully for Cleveland mayor in 1947. He died a decade later but not
before co-writing a book about his exploits titled "The
Untouchables," a "highly fictionalized" account that "made
him uncomfortable," according to Perry.

The
problem, it seems, is that much of what we think we know about Ness comes from
that book, the television show starring Stack a half-century ago and Costner's
portrayal of Ness in the 1987 movie.

There
is even suspicion that the virtuous character the public knows may not be Ness
at all because Ness's co-author, Oscar Fraley, took the qualities ascribed to
Ness from Elmer Irey, another famous lawman who played a key role in sending
Capone to prison.

"My
guess is that Oscar Fraley stole all that from Elmer, his makeup, and gave it
to Ness," said Paul Camacho, an IRS special agent in Las Vegas who has
made it his mission to rescue Irey's name from obscurity. "He was a real
American hero."

By
the time, the story got to Hollywood, the goal was to tell a good story, not
give a history lesson.

Bob
Fuesel, a former IRS agent who knew Mike Malone, the inspiration for Sean
Connery's character in the movie, said he did his own research of the
intelligence unit that conducted the tax-evasion investigation and later became
the IRS's criminal division. When he was a consultant on the film, he said, he
told Costner that Ness had nothing to do with the tax-evasion case and that men
who worked with Ness told stories about how he was afraid of guns.

"I
told Kevin that Eliot Ness did not do any of this stuff, and Kevin said, 'Bob,
this is Hollywood. ... We make it up as we go along,'" said Fuesel, who is
also the former head of the Chicago Crime Commission.

Costner
did not respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Jonathan
Eig, author of "Get Capone," the book Burke wants the senators to
read, said that while Ness did investigate Capone's bootlegging activities in
Chicago, none of what he discovered helped put Capone behind bars. And there is
no evidence that Capone and his supposed nemesis ever even met.

"My
guess is that Al Capone never heard of Eliot Ness," he said, "even
after he went to jail."